DIGIPAK: Front Cover Final Version

This is the final version of the front cover.

Below you can see a vodcast, which I created, in which I explain how I created the final version in Adobe Photoshop. I edited the vodcast using Final Cut Pro X on our Mac's in school. While working in Photoshop, I took screenshots along the way, using cmd alt and 4 so I could select and control exactly what I was taking screenshots of.


I used my phone to record the audio for this, imported it into final cut and layered it over the images. I chose to do a vodcast rather than screen record as I plan to do a couple more screen recordings when doing either the back cover or inner panels.

GENERAL CONVENTIONS: Throne

In this take of our rough cut, the cables from the microphone, guitars and keyboard are all plugged in to the amps. This is done to achieve verisimilitude and to present a convincing performance. Achieving verisimilitude is very important especially to rock/ metal bands as they want to prove their authenticity.
The guitar on the left is covered in stickers which has connotations of music, as many of them are band stickers. This signifies that the band are authentic and play their own instruments as it looks 'used'.

At 0.28 in our rough cut, we have this shot of the lead singer. The forest background has connotations of darkness and mystery which echo the genre and feeling of the song they are performing. In film and TV, especially in the horror genre, forests are depicted as scary and daunting. However, we have slightly challenged this convention by filming during the day, in the sun. We did this as typical, darker music and videos are typically more popular among men and we wanted to also appeal to a female audience.

The cross on the lead singer's neck, while creating verisimilitude and a convincing rock band member, also signifies religion, faith and love. This is also a simple design which many of their fans could re-create in fan-art or draw on themselves, helping them to feel involved and connected to the artist.

SR: WEBSITE: Changes

Today, we had a photoshoot with our band members and I wanted to put up the new pictures and edit our website. 

In the links list called "About the Band", I made quite a lot of changes. Firstly, I added the new pictures of the band members and in the near future I also intend to add a small bibiliography or quote from the individual band member. Also it says "About the Band" on the top of the page, where Wix had invented a small text below the title for it to look more realistic. My job has been to change these texts including the band bibliography and the official website text. Today I therefore changed the text beneath the title and I added the new picture of our band.

The text says the following: In 2004, Sykes formed Bring Me the Horizon, a band which rose to fame very quickly. The band released their debut album Count Your Blessings in 2006. Their second album Suicide Season was released on September 29, 2008 and their third studio album There is a Hell. Believe Me, I've Seen It. There is aHeaven, Let's Keep It a Secret on October 4, 2010 and they released their fourth studio album Sempiternal on April 1, 2013 which feature the new member Jordan Fish and Sykes playing rhythm guitar for the album and they released their fifth studio album That's the Spirit on September 11, 2015.

Furthermore, I decided to change the layout of the first page of our official website, since I thought that it was difficult to read the white font on the picture of the band but even with just the logo behind it. Therefore I ended up with a black background where the fond is easily readable and you can see a picture of the band with all of it's band members. The text says: 

Only a year after starting out as a band, Bring Me The Horizon gained significant attention! Composed of a group of 5 inspirational musicians and skillful performers, the artists behind Bring Me The Horizon have throughout the last 12 years earned their reputation as a talented metal core band. By also winning the awards for Best British Band twice and Best Album, BMTH are internationally admired by millions of fans for their distinct and enjoyable musical style. Explore the site and check out their music, tour dates and merch below.

I also decided to add a gallery with a scrolling through rather than just that one image. Now there are images of the band that automatically appear and change after a few seconds, but also it is advertising for the newest merchandise. I put a picture up of the new merchandise (white T-Shirt), where I then added a link that the audience could click on and would automatically be re-directed to the merch site. 

In the future I intend to add a picture of an upcoming concert, where the audience can click on one button where it says "buy tickets here", that then re-directs them to the official BMTH tour dates and places they can buy tickets. I believe that small tricks like these make the website appear more realistic and can also attract a wider audience.

KO: Target Audience: BMTH (Magazine)

For audience research I will be looking at some magazines that have featured Bring me the Horizon. Then I will look at the genre for those magazines and that will help use determine who the target audience is for the band.

Bring me the Horizon have featured on the cover of AP (Alternative Press) many times. You can see from the photos that they have features in issue #248, #268, #299, #327, and more. By looking at APs Website I saw an article that was tilted "18 tattoos that will send chills down your spine". This tells me that the age range is centered at around 20 year old as they are the ones who generally get tattoos. Other bands that have featured on AP are such as "Twenty One Pilots", "Crown the Empire", and "Panic! At the disco".

BMTH have also been on the cover of Rock Sound a few times. Other bands that have featured on Rock Sound are bands such as "Twenty One Pilots", "Green Day", "30 Seconds to Mars".

Rock Sounds age range is slightly lower than AP as Rock Sound features some bands that arnt as heavy such as "30 Seconds to Mars". Although on there website there is mentions of alcohol which is 18+ in England. The age range of both magazines i would say is around 18 to late 20s, but AP focuses more on a heavy metal group. 

Treatment

I wrote a treatment for the idea for our music video, whereas Sophie applied the pictures and theories. The treatment is something that could be handed out to people when presenting a vodcast or spoken explanation of our idea.

GROUP:

We are creating a music video for the song ‘Follow You’ by Bring Me the Horizon. Our group consists of Bronwen, Kristian and Sophie. The brief of our project is to create a music video, a website and a digipak. 

SUMMARY:

To summarise our idea, we will combine both performance and concept and will also include some aspects of a fragmented narrative. We are going to have the band performing in an abandoned location and also outside. We will also have the lead singer in other locations such as a bathroom and bathtub. There will be a female protagonist who will actually be a ghost, and we will achieve this through different editing techniques such as layering. The lead singer will slowly grow more and more crazy, thinking about the girl. The female protagonist could actually be someone in his life who passed away or just be representative of a relationship ending. We will use colour powder and black balloons during certain scenes.

INSPIRATION: 

We took inspiration from a great variety of music videos by various artists and genres. As examples, we were inspired by the use of colour in Up in the air by 30 Seconds to Mars, where they use color powder and in Bagboy by Pixies, where there are colored cereals in the bathtub.

We were also inspired by Joe, a previous media studies student from our school, as we really liked his use of layering, where there is a clear link between visuals and lyrics as well. We want to use one of Andrew Goodwin's suggested features of a music video, which is too establish a clear link between visuals and lyrics. There is one scene, where our leadsinger sings "Cross my heart and hope to die", where we will get a Pig's heart (achieving verismilitude) and have him squeeze it to connote his pain. 

MISE-EN-SCENE + CASTING: 

As the mise-en-scene of our music video will be crucial in obtaining a professional and believable final product, as well as achieving verisimilitude, we put a lot of thought into it. 

For the mise-en-scene such as costume for our band members, we got inspired from rock bands such as ofcourse Bring Me the Horizon themselves, THE 1975, My Chemical Romance and Fall out Boy, whose logo you can see here on the right of the post. 


Ofcourse, we also needed students who could fit the role and who had some experience with playing an instrument. Therefore, we held casting sessions where we filmed students from our school and outside of school as well in order to get a variety and have students/people who fit together as a group and are keen on doing the project with us. We had advertised for this via social media such as Facebook and had found males who were very keen on taking part as a band member. We will discuss, who we are choosing as our band members in our Podcast 2. 

We will dress the members in black ripped skinny jeans and black jackets, ripped t-shirts and black boots such as Doc.Martens/sneakers such as all black Converse or Vans. The lead singer, and also perhaps the female protagonist will have skull face paint on their faces, inspired by the TV show, American Horror Story. Some members will be wearing eyeliner and we have also ordered some materials in which we can create temporary tattoos to put on the band members necks and arms. 

Bronwen will design and draw these tattoos as she is an art student who has designed tattoos before. In order for the tattoos to stick, we ordered "water based-ink-jet-water transfer paper" from Amazon, which can go into the copy machine and be printed out with nice tattoos that Bronwen will draw by hand. The tattoos, will be based on what the Bring Me The Horizon band members have and also other rock bands such as You Me At Six, but mainly Bring Me The Horizon. This means that they will contain tattoos such as a skeleton, cross etc, which we will be evidencing on our blogs soon. 

The female protagonist’s makeup and outfit was inspired by the female characters in the Fall out Boy song, My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark. She will be wearing black skinny jeans, a crop top with some cleavage and a leather jacket. Her make-up will consist of dark, smokey eye makeup, mascare and a dark red lipstick. 

AUDIENCE:

In our investigation of target audience, we found that the main audience of alternative rock like the song Follow You, is males aged 16-25. This means that the video also should appeal to a male audience (Laura Mulvey, male gaze theory), which is why she will be wearing those type of clothes. 

DIGIPACK + WEBSITE:

On Sunday, we have our first shoot, where we will also be doing a photo shooting with the band members, which will most likely be the cover of our digipack together with a logo of the band that we will create ourselves. We will do a post shortly, where we will be investigating for different fonts that fit into the genre and could potentially be used for our digipack. 

On Monday the 17th, we will be creating our website for our band and start setting up our social media accounts. 

STORYBOARD 1: Follow You

This is the storyboard i have created for our music video. I did quick sketches with short descriptions and no timings or lyrics. This is because the call sheets have a more in depth description and the storyboard is more to give an idea of what kind of visuals there will be and a general sense of how the music video will look. The drawings i did are not very artistically advanced as the point is not the quality of the art, but more to just get an idea of how the video will look when filmed.